


With Calico Roses

by storyofapainter



Category: Breaking Bad, Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-22
Updated: 2011-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:11:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyofapainter/pseuds/storyofapainter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Jesse Pinkman meets Ray Person at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum.</p><p>(AU starting around Season 3, Episode 11, “Abiqui.”)</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Calico Roses

**Author's Note:**

> (warning for a few uses of in-character, ableist language)

Jesse drives to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum that Saturday because why the fuck not. He doesn’t have to cook and his brain has started to feel heavy what with stealing from that stupid chicken man and lying to Mr. White and trying to get his fucking friends to put even an ounce of effort into selling his hard earned product. 

He doesn’t plan it or any of that bullshit, doesn’t wake up on the floor of this aunt’s house and think, “You know what’d be cool to see today? Some pictures that look like vaginas.” Not that he’d say no to seeing some chick’s actual vagina, but he’s not thinking about that either because he’s been thinking about Jane a lot lately and that leaves him empty in a way which doesn’t leave much space for anything else. 

He just feels the tension in his back and his left shoulder and eats cereal out of the box while he stares at the kitchen window. It takes a little while for him to see it, but once the colors come together to form window panes and trees and lazy, white clouds, he feels like driving. 

Jesse drives north because it’s as good of a direction as the others and he’s five exits away before he realizes where he’s going. The laugh is a little startling, how low in the chest it starts and how strange it feels after, like it’s still there in the air with his cigarette smoke. He lights another and drives on. 

He parks on the street and lets the engine cool all the way down. He knows what’s inside that building. Besides a lot of doors and vaginas there is an angry woman at the welcome desk who hadn’t liked his hat or his face or his attitude and who Jane had charmed with half a smile. There are the cow skull paintings, which he really had liked and which Jane had pulled him gently away from, hand soft in his. (And there was that one corner near the mountains which looked like loose skin where she’d pushed him against the wall for just one second.) But she was in this car too that day, tattooing her cigarettes with imperfect pink and taking about the universe and home and making things last and if he’s driven all the way out here with her in the next seat, he might as well go in, too. Jesse takes a little more smoke into his lungs and slams the car door. He has to piss anyway. 

The angry woman must not work Saturdays or maybe someone fucking punched her in the face for being such a miserable bitch, but either way the woman sitting behind the desk today is older. She’s knitting something small, like for a baby and when she welcomes him and smiles it’s like he’s looking at his aunt. Jesse swallows the sick feeling (fuck these fucking dead people still being everywhere) and smiles back. 

When she asks, Jesse says he hasn’t been here before and takes the brochure she offers. Her hand lingers on his arm for a minute and he’s not going to cry because she’s just some old lady giving him a piece of paper. 

If he splashes cold water on his face in the bathroom it’s only because he lives in New fucking Mexico and it’s hot out here, bitches. 

He moves past the flowers and the doors and the messes of color and line that Jane insisted were trees and stops before the skull with big, twisting horns. It’s weird that the horns are this brown, clay color instead of the same white as the bone. It feels wrong, somehow, like maybe these are two things that shouldn’t have touched, but the fuck does he know about animals. Only, he’s not too sure about the flower, either. It’s a really bright fucking blue with this little, orange center and the skull only has one eye socket left whole so the flower stares at him in its place. 

Jesse has been terrified for weeks, even as he curls his lip up at Mr. White and even as he lectures Badger and Skinny Pete about how easy it should be for them to sell. He’s had this panic under his skin for so long that it’s almost become friendly now, something to remind him he’s still alive and here even if other people are not. 

Jane said it didn’t matter what you saw when you looked at paintings. Yes, she liked to argue about them, but she also told him these were here to make him feel. Right now, Jesse feels alone and cold and trapped in the impossible gaze of some other dead fucking thing. Then he remembers the vaginas and suddenly that is all there is to see here and he laughs again. It feels much better than it did in the car, like the time before had knocked something loose and this laugh moves easy into the quiet room. 

A woman whose skirt is both too tight and too short for her turns toward him from the picture on his left and gives him a look like she’s just caught him masturbating.

“Have some respect,” she says. “Some of us are here because we respect Georgia as an artist. Not for a cheap laugh.”

“I don’t know,” a voice says from behind her. “I think he’s got a point. I mean, I’m assuming he’s laughing because of the ‘lady painted vaginas’ thing and not because, I don’t fucking know, he’s some kind of retard who finds his own shoes hilarious. That’s certainly why I’m here. Not for his shoes. For the vagina pictures.”

The woman turns away from Jesse. The guy who spoke is skinny, with tattoos dark on his arms, enormous sunglasses on his head and he’s smiling. Smiling like he knows exactly what’s coming. Like he’s fucking counting on it. 

“Excuse me?” the woman says, “Do you have any idea how offensive–”

“There’s no law against seeing genitalia where ever the fuck I please. Which is a really good thing because otherwise I’d be in a shit-fuck ton of trouble. And I’m not even trying to see it–well, most of the time–it’s just some things look like our junk. You can’t tell me you have never looked at a hot dog and thought, ‘Well shit. That kind of looks like a dick.’”

The woman’s face is bright red; she looks like some kind of stupid and colorful bird, puffing up for a fight, but the guy is still talking. 

“And there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. We all have one or the other. Or both. That’s okay, too. Weird. But okay. That must be wild, huh? You ever met anyone like that?”

She tries to answer a few times and then huffs off instead, muttering about reporting them. Jesse knows they have nothing to worry about because like hell that bitch is repeating anything this guy said to the old lady at the desk. 

The guy is still smiling as he moves to stand right next to Jesse. 

“So, were you?”

“What?” 

“Laughing at the vaginas? Please don’t actually be retarded.” 

The guy’s eyes are huge and he’s leaning in a little, like he might try to check, somehow. Jesse takes a step back. 

“What? No. I’m not retarded.”

The guy relaxes onto the flats of his feet. 

“Okay. Cool. So?”

Jesse does not know what this guy’s fucking deal is, but he did just sort of save him or whatever from having to deal with that random bitch. 

“Yeah. I mean I thought that. But mostly it looks like it’s staring at me.” 

“Holy shit, dude. It is.” 

He starts moving in a semi-circle in front of the canvas. 

“The eyes are definitely following me. Eye. Flower and eye.”

He stops weaving and sticks his hand out toward Jesse. 

“I’m Ray,” he says.

“Jesse,” Jesse says and shakes.

Ray nods and starts to say something else, but before it’s anything more than a weird noise he turns to the painting with sudden purpose. 

“You know what I just figured out. This picture? It’s not vaginas. It’s the stupid fucking rabbit from _Donnie Darko_. Look. Even one of the eyes is fucked up.” Ray turns back to face Jesse. “Do you see it?”

Jesse does. 

-o-o-o-

For the second time today Jesse is not entirely sure why he is where he is, but as he’s currently in Ray Person’s Santa Fe motel room smoking some very good weed, he doesn’t really care. Ray is spread out on the bed, explaining how he’s road tripping across the southern United States. He says he woke up one day and missed the desert and even though he couldn’t fucking believe it, here he is. 

“It’s probably better than the last time I did this. For one, no one is fucking shooting at me. Oh, and I can shower and shit and eat and jack-off whenever the fuck I want–what am I fucking saying, of course this is better. Although not getting shot at means no shooting back...”

Jesse is sitting on the floor, propped against the bed, his neck tipped up. The paint is peeling in three different places. There is something weird about Ray’s story. Something he doesn’t understand. But he doesn’t really have the energy to ask. Or remember what it was.  

“Do you live in Santa Fe?” Ray says, waving one of his hands vaguely into Jesse’s line of vision. 

“Albuquerque.”  

Jesse takes the joint. Inhales. 

“And what do you do in the ABQ?”

Breathes out. 

“I’m a salesman,” he says. “I sell...things.”

“Yeah, like what?” He can hear Ray roll over onto his stomach. “Have you been holding out on me? Are you a pimp, homes?” 

“No, man. Just things, you know, stuff.”

“Jesse. Jesse. Jesse. I am shocked. Here I am providing you with this quality fucking weed and you’re a fucking drug dealer.”

“I don’t sell weed.”

“Yeah, but you probably know where to get some.”

“Doesn’t every one?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Ray says and starts to laugh. It sounds really nice so Jesse joins in.  

-o-o-o-

There is half a bottle of tequila in Ray’s duffel bag which he shakes in Jesse’s face about an hour later. Jesse is already too fucked up to want to drive home tonight so he figures what the hell. Ray is good company–he’s seriously fucking hilarious–and it’s not like he really had other plans. 

Jesse considers calling someone. Telling anyone in the world where he is. His phone is in the pocket of his sweatshirt, which is currently under the dresser, but even if he were to scroll through his contacts, he can’t call any of the people whose voices he actually wants to hear. Any of the people who would or should care why he isn’t coming home tonight. 

Ray is sitting at the head of the bed, bottle in hand, talking about fighting in a war. 

“You really fought in Iraq?” he asks, looking at Ray over the edge of the bed.

“Fuck yeah, man. What the fuck did you think I was talking about earlier? That I’d gone to some third-world shit-steeped country where they shot me for a vacation?”

“I thought you were joking?”

“Naw, I was there. First fucking platoon in country. And Afghanistan before that.”

“Shit.”

Jesse’s dad had talked to him a few times about the Army. Tried to make it sound nice. Tried to make it sound impressive. Jesse had rolled his eyes and slammed his door and climbed out his window. 

“What’s it like to kill someone?” He asks.

“Everyone the fuck asks that.”

“So?”

“So be more original? Why doesn’t anyone ever want to know the gritty details about what it’s like to serve their country? Why don’t you want to hear about the honor? The duty? No. It’s always about the blood. Look there’s the time I was at war and now there’s the rest of my life. And nary the two shall meet.” He stops to laugh at himself. “I can’t really qualify the experience in terms that fucking pussy civilians could appreciate or understand.”

“Yeah,” Jesse says and gestures for the tequila. “But what’s it like?”

“Pretty fucking awesome,” and Ray’s grinning as he slides onto this stomach to hand the bottle over. Jesse takes a quick, burning swallow. 

“So what about the other stuff? The honor and all that shit?”

Ray’s face is half pressed to the ugly purple and green comforter, but he drags it off the bed to look Jesse straight in the face. He looks for a second like he might lunge at him. Jesse can’t think what he said that would make Ray want to hit him, but he’s just realized how not prepared he is for a scuffle when Ray grins his wild grin instead.  

“Oh, that shit’s boring. The killing is where it’s motherfucking at.”

-o-o-o-

Jesse takes another swig from the bottle and starts talking about Jane. Ray is listening from on top of the bed, on his back again, head at the foot of it. He doesn’t know why Ray cares about his stupid, dead girlfriend or even if he’s really listening, but Jesse can’t stop. He doesn’t really know what he’s saying, if it’s in any order or anything he should even share, but he’s at least confident he’s gotten the most important point across–how it is his fault–and somewhere in there, Ray moves across the bed.

Jesse doesn’t know (and this is the story of this fucking life today and probably always, if he’s honest, which he is right now, because he’s had just enough to be able to remember all the things he doesn’t like about himself without hating himself for it) how or why Ray is suddenly breathing a little less than steadily right behind him. He has one hand heavy on Jesse’s shoulder to turn him. Jesse realizes neither of them are talking and he’s about to say how weird it sounds in the room, with no one’s voice running itself over when Ray crushes their faces together instead. 

Jesse holds his breath and when he realizes what he’s doing he laughs instead and oh, that’s a tongue in his mouth. In what he is certain starts as a push to remove it, ends as a push onto the bed itself, that skinny body under his. Ray is pulling at pieces of him–cloth and otherwise–and this feels like something. 

He can’t say what because he’s a little busy pulling right back and a little more busy trying not to look too hard at his choices, but this day really has been out of his hands from the very start and he’s just following, even if where it’s led him now is one hand feeling another guy’s dick through his jeans. 

“Holy shit,” Ray says. He sounds very far away. “Not what I was expecting from tonight. But don’t fucking stop there.”

“You kissed me, asshole.”

“Yeah,” Ray twists his hips up, into Jesse’s hand. Jesse presses him back into the bed with his whole body. “But I thought you would punch me.”

“You want me to punch you?”

“No. Well, that would have been okay. A fight, you know. But this is good, too. Better.”

“Shut up,” Jesse says and bites at Ray’s ear. 

“Holy– Look man, if you want me to shut up, biting is not the way to go about it.”

“Fine. Keep talking,” Jesse is working his jeans off. He’s going to have to wear these tomorrow. “Just, you know, do something too.”

Ray struggles out of his clothes before Jesse and waits with what Jesse assumes is supposed to be eyelash fluttering, but which looks more like a seizure. 

“You look like you’re dying,” Jesse tells him. 

“Well, then save me.” 

Jesse doesn’t know how they’re both not broken, with how hard they’re pushing on each other’s limbs. He is going to have bruises and he’s given more than one and maybe this is a fight after all. Certainly, something is at stake. Ray starts missing his body when he lifts his hips and Jesse realigns them and then slides his hand to Ray’s cock. Ray gasps into the space below his right ear and tries to spit into one of his hands before grabbing at Jesse, but Jesse catches the wayward palm.

“You don’t need to–”

“Right, yeah, right.”

And then there’s another guy’s hand around his cock. He is expecting that to be obvious, somehow, but it’s really just a hand. Everyone has hands. With that revelation Jesse comes, trying his best to bring Ray with him. 

-o-o-o-

Jesse opens his eyes at exactly the same time as Ray. That or Ray was awake before him and waiting, but that’s a little too fucking creepy for right now. Either way, Ray is staring at him and he stares back because he’s sure as fuck not going to freak out first. It’s a draw or maybe they both win, except Ray loses something because he breaks the stare in a scramble not to run screaming or to throw Jesse out with his clothes, but to vomit repeatedly. 

Jesse follows because he can taste a lot of things in his mouth right now and none are very nice. (He borrows Ray’s toothbrush because it’s not like he’s strangers with his spit and it’s not like Ray can stop him, hunched over the toilet.) Jesse showers with Ray still making low noises of pain as he heaves. 

The bruises are darkest on his right side, over his ribs. He thinks he might be able to see the spaces between fingers. Ray steps into the shower as he is rinsing the cheap conditioner from his hair. Ray grins and moves his hand to fit over the soft, purple copy. Jesse shivers. 

-o-o-o-

There is a Denny’s two blocks up from the motel. Jesse orders pancakes and sausage; Ray orders a Santa Fe skillet and finds it hilarious. 

“It sucks you don’t live around here,” Jesse says after the waitress walks away. “Or you could teach me some secret Marine things.”

“Sorry. You can’t know the handshake or password unless you’re a real member.”

“Not that. Choke holds. Killing people stuff.”

Ray tilts his head and chews on his lip. 

“If you’re ever near Missouri. Nevada, Missouri. Maybe,” Ray says and sips his orange juice nosily through a bendy straw. “We don’t have a skillet named after us or anything, but there is less sand.”

“Isn’t the sand why you’re here?”

“Yeah, but it’s also why I’d never stay. And my mom. She’s miss me too fucking much. Probably try to move, too. You were born in Albuquerque? Your folks still around?”

Jesse empties a straw full of water onto a crinkled up wrapper and watches it unfold itself. 

“I don’t see them. Too many drugs. Not enough school. No more chances.”

He doesn’t feel as angry as he usually does, after talking about his parents. He chews on a piece of ice from his Coke. Ray wipes the water from the outside of his juice glass and then shakes it from his fingers. Jesse watches were the drops fall. 

“Why are you still here, Jesse?”

“What?”

“In New Mexico. If your parents don’t talk to you and the girl you mentioned last night died, why are still here? You just don’t seem like you’re having a very good time.”

It’s where he’s always lived and that is reason enough, right up until something smashes into his chest and breaks a piece he didn’t know had still been whole. He looks at Ray and can’t find a single word, but for the first time in a long time it’s because there are too many waiting and not because all his mind can offer is a low and constant buzz. 

When the waitress drops off their plates, Ray asks for hot sauce and she just eyes the Tabasco on the table.

“Real hot sauce,” Ray says. “Am I or am I not in a desert state known for its spicy food?”

“We’re also at a Denny’s,” Jesse says and the waitress shifts her sharp glare to him. “What?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she snaps, like he’s just asked her to kill something small and furry solely for his amusement. 

“Well, I’m not tipping,” he says once she’s gone. 

“Do all women hate you? Because I’ve known you for less than two days and you’ve seriously pissed off a number of them without doing much. It would be impressive if it wasn’t also so sad.”

“Look, it’s not my fault there are a shit-ton of crazy bitches around here–” Jesse starts, but the waitress has, of course, moved back into earshot and when she does bring a bottle of a local hot sauce, Ray refuses to touch it, convinced she would be satisfied with poisoning either one of them. 

When Ray ducks back to the table to grab his sunglasses, Jesse sees him leave his half of the tip too, but pretends he’s just been looking at the ugly art when Ray catches up, shades already covering his eyes. 

-o-o-o-

Jesse stands with his keys in his hand for two minutes before he shoves them into his pocket and knocks on Ray’s door. Ray has his toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and his sunglasses still propped on his head. 

“Ooh orget osthing?” he attempts, letting go of the door and waving Jesse into the room. Jesse hears him spit into the sink.

“Forget something? Or did you miss my pretty mug already?” 

He is still holding the toothbrush when he comes back into the room. Jesse takes it.

“Just because you used it once, doesn’t mean it’s yours and that’s some whiskey-tango levels of fucked up besides.”

Jesse passes Ray and throws the toothbrush onto the sink ledge. He turns around as Ray comes to the doorframe to check what’s happened. Jesse backs him up against it, stands in the two rooms at once, like the time he was twelve and his dad had driven them to where four states met. He’d forgotten that until he stood here, between a shitty room and a shittier bathroom and Ray. 

When Jesse slides one hand behind Ray’s skull and the other to where the bruise would have been if he was touching his own body, everything is sharply and wholly possible. Ray holds him right back and after they break, he exhales low and close to the skin. 

“Thank you,” Jesse says. 

“Semper fi,” Ray answers.

Jesse drives south and doesn’t slow when he feels it, like a cord coming loose on a car roof and leaving the things one owns in an angry pattern on the highway. By the time he is home, it’s like he never left at all. The bruise goes last, but it does go. He wishes the rest of his life knew how to disappear like that. 

-o-o-o-

Not long after, Jesse tries to kill someone. Two someones. He doesn’t succeed, but he thinks about Ray right before he tries and how this would be so much fucking easier if he knew how the Marines did it. The men do die, but it’s at the hands of an old man and a car and no hesitation whatsoever of the trigger finger. 

When Saul suggests he leave town, Jesse can see the fight gather in the man. He knows Mr. White looks the same (but worse). Knows both of them expect him to cling to this place. And he would have. A few weeks ago he would have swore and threatened and begged. Neither realizes he’s nodding, both stumbling over reasons, until it’s Saul who sees him first. Jesse always knew (in some other impossible, but unshattered place) that he was going to leave. Just needed a push. Mr. White thanks him for not being difficult, for once, and turns away. 

Jesse thinks he’ll hate Mr. White for a while. Just feels like the right thing to do. Even if he saved him. 

When he leaves town this time, Jesse knows where he’s going. Okay, he doesn’t know the exact address, but he has a feeling when he gets off this bus it won’t take much asking around to find Ray. 

**Author's Note:**

> The main painting I talk about can be found here: http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/natural-and-still-life-forms.html (scroll down)
> 
> I have never been to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (or any part of New Mexico) and everything I know about either one comes from Breaking Bad or the internet. I probably messed something up. Sorry, locals.
> 
> I wrote this story the week before Skylar went to the Four Corners Monument on the show, so when she did turn up there I almost fell off my couch in a mixture of joy and surprise.
> 
> [For Devin because she insisted Jesse needed friends and that Ray would be awesome in that role. With a happy ending because she was very specific about that bit.]


End file.
